The Passing Parade: Cheap Shots from a Drive By Mind

"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae
tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..."
"...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32)
akakyakakyevich@gmail.com

Thursday, March 31, 2005

MRS. SCHIAVO AND MR. LINCOLN: As everyone who watches C-Span knows, although everyone may be too strong an adjective to describe C-Span's audience, implying as it does a potential viewership high in the double digits, members of the House of Representatives may revise and extend their remarks when those remarks are published in the Congressional Record, a practice that once led my government documents professor to call the Congressional Record the longest ongoing work of fiction in the history of literature. Since the only federal office Abraham Lincoln ever held before his election to the Presidency, if you exclude his time as a postmaster, was as a one term Representative from Illionois, I am going to revise a set of his remarks in light of what is happening in Florida. (A news flash here: in case you haven't heard, Terri Schiavo died this morning)

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read in “all men are created equal, except the unborn.” When the liberals and the ACLU get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except the unborn, and the infirm and the religious of all faiths.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to North Korea, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

HOKEY SMOKES, BULLWINKLE! I CANT GET TO MY BLOG CUZ I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF A NORMLANCHE!!!!! YEEE--HAAAAAA! YEEE--HAAAAAAAAAAAY!!! as Major Kong so memorably put it as he rode the hydrogen bomb down to the target. Thanks for the shout out, Norm.

Monday, March 28, 2005

DOGS: Dog owners have an entirely malign psychological influence on their pets these days, I’m afraid. I discovered this bit of psychozoological trivia whilst walking down the main drag of our happy little burg this past Saturday. As I passed one of the seemingly innumerable antique stores popping up along Main Street like freckles on a red head just before the junior prom; stores specializing in the sale of upscale second-hand tchotchkes being one out our burg’s major industries, along with long term incarceration, modern art, and the sandwich trade; the owner’s dog accosted me, baring its teeth and snarling viciously. In the ordinary course of events, a snarling, barking dog would make me back off slowly and say, nice doggy, good doggy, and hope that the dog is not one of those animals trained to immediately attack any person saying, nice doggy, good doggy, but this was not one of those cases. I did back away from the dog, but it was the kind of backing off done when a very ill person rises from their sickbed to take a swing at you; you back off because you don’t want to hurt them.

And so it was with this dog, a small white haired dust mop of an animal obviously suffering from what I believe the French, who should know about this sort of thing, call le folie de grandeur. This is a strange sort of megalomania, a megalomania that causes the sufferer to mistake his or her place in the overall scheme of things and as a result act in ways guaranteed to get themselves stomped on badly. The dog was simply acting the way it always acted; as the pampered pet of an elderly woman it is no doubt accustomed to getting its way in every situation it finds itself in, its yipping and yapping gaining for it the due its outsized canine ego requires from the much put upon humans who form its usual companions. Prolonged exposure to humans, especially humans of the British or American variety can be a dangerous thing for a small dog, as the exposed dog may deduce that since all men are created equal, it must needs follow that all dogs are created equal as well, dogs being a superior species to humans in every category worth enumerating.

I say this because coming up the street towards me was a young man of serious mien, an up and coming local entrepreneur in the always profitable informal pharmaceutical trade, walking that breed of dog officially known in some circles as the Staffordshire terrier and in others as the American pit bull. The dust mop yipped ferociously at the pit bull, which stopped for a moment and looked at the dust mop as if it had gone completely out of its small mind. Then the pit charged and would, no doubt, have destroyed the mop with a single crushing bite had not its owner pulled back hard on the leash. The dust mop, realizing that he had started something that could lead to its swift, if not immediate, demise, scampered into the antique shop to cower behind a display of Hummel figurines, a touching testament to the wholly mistaken belief in the power of china shops to stop bulls. The pit bull, on the other hand, was all for going inside and having it out with the mop; there’s nothing quite as gratifying for some folks as getting into a fight they know they can’t lose and can credibly tell the judge later that it was self-defense, really, your honor, it was, he started the whole thing, no kidding; but the pit’s owner wouldn’t hear of it and so they went on, with the pit looking back every few yards to see if the mop had come back out onto the sidewalk.

One could even imagine the pit planning on how to break free of its master and go for the mop unimpeded by the namby-pamby human concepts of fair play and a fair fight. This sort of utterly literal bloody-mindedness is, of course, is one of the pit bull’s least attractive qualities, and one noticed and commented on by many people, even, to some extent, by the pit bull's many admirers, who otherwise defend their breed with every fiber of their being. I think we all expect them to do this, although even the most rabid defender of the breed will concede, privately and off the record, you understand, that on the whole pit bulls are singularly lacking in that ironic sensibility cultivated in many other dog breeds, such as Border Collies, Dachshunds, and Irish wolfhounds, which would allow them to appreciate the almost absurdist, neo-Beckettian, and Kafkaesque gallows type humor inherent in such a situation.

Friday, March 25, 2005

SCHIAVO: First and foremost, let’s be clear as to what we are talking about here. The crux of the matter is this: Terri Schiavo, a severely brain damaged woman, is starving to death under the cover of law. Keep that squarely in mind, because that and only that is reality; everything else is just words. Remember George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, in which Orwell pointed out that “in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” What is happening now as I write this, at 10:11 am on March 25th, 2005, is that a woman who cannot defend herself or make her wishes known is dying at the behest of a husband with an irreconcilable conflict of interest. The lawyers telling you otherwise, the doctors who say that Terri’s passing will be painless, the liberal legislators with a newly discovered and hitherto unsuspected love of federalism and state's rights, are all trying to sugarcoat the poison; they want, in Orwell’s words, “…make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” They are trying to ease your conscience about what is happening to Terri Schiavo. Let’s try something here. Say this to yourself: I think that allowing brain-damaged people to starve to death is a good idea. Say it out loud if you want to. Give it a try.

Okay, if that didn’t sit well with you, congratulations; if it did, think about what you just said about yourself. Think about this, too: Terri Schiavo is not going away. If you think for a minute that other people will not regard her case as a legal precedent for ending treatment to the brain-damaged, Alzheimer’s’ patients, and others in need of long term treatment then you are seriously deluding yourself. Sooner or later, given the longer and longer life spans made possible by advances in medical science, we will all be Terri Schiavo, and my advice to you is the same advice I’d give to Michael Schiavo: be nice to your kids, or someday they’ll cut you the same slack you cut Terri.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

PALM SUNDAY: One of the great things about Palm Sunday is seeing large numbers of people you didn’t know were Catholic because you haven’t seen them anywhere near the church since last Palm Sunday. It makes you think that if you can get people into church by offering free palm fronds then maybe attendance would really improve a hundred fold if the church offered something people really wanted like free oil changes or cigarettes at half price. The church could even rent space under the Stations of the Cross for a farmers’ market or let the local 4-H Club hold their meetings there; a Starbucks would work, too; that would bring in all those college students who need a quiet place to do their homework and a place to drink their decaffeinated triple mocha lattes, although they might object to Catholic ritual, what with all those people saying the same thing at the same time, and choirs singing loudly to an off key organ while they’re studying for midterms.

You can’t please everyone, I guess, but I think an ice cream parlor in a confessional would be a neat touch. You could go to the church on a Saturday afternoon for Confession and wait at the end of a long line of little kids getting ready for their First Holy Communion, and listen to them go in and ask the priest for absolution and a chocolate fudge swirl in a sugar cone with a lot of those great red and green sprinkles and chocolate syrup and whipped cream and a huge cherry on top. That’ll bring those Palm Sunday Catholics back to the church in droves, if I don’t miss my guess here. Their kids will torture them to go to church. Of course, by the time it’s your turn to go in and speak with the priest the chocolate will be all gone, and most of the sprinkles as well, but that’s not why you went to Confession, is it? You wanted walnuts and M & M's on your cone, didn't you?

Sunday, March 20, 2005

THANKS: I'd like to thank Rachel at Tinkerty Tonk for her kind words and Conservator for linking to me. For those of you who are actually conservative librarians looking for a kindred spirit and are wondering what kind of freak show the Conservator has sent you to, let me tell you that I am more than willing to be serious in your comments section; I can be just as serious as the next guy, if I have to be, but The Passing Parade is dedicated to the longstanding Irish notion that the world is, at best, a bad joke played on us all by the Almighty on an off day and that the best we can do is go along with the joke for the time being. I hope you enjoy your stay here.

PARTS IS PARTS: I think we’ve all been to parties and other social gatherings where we’ve wondered why we bothered to show up at all. Maybe the host owed you a dinner, maybe your wife is making you go, maybe your employer requires you to be there in order to make an important customer happy, but no matter why you showed up, you’re here, and here is a disaster of Titanic sized proportions and you would willingly cut off your left arm for an excuse to get out of this hellhole right now. This sort of thing happens to us all on occasion; just a part of the strange lottery of life, but it’s worse when you’re the host of this ten ton stone balloon and you know everyone in the place is blaming you for that awkward and uncomfortable feeling we all get when we know the party’s heading south and we wish we were, too.

Part of your problem may be that you do not have any interesting conversation pieces in your home. A good conversation piece gets people talking, gets them comparing notes about the piece on your coffee table and others pieces they’ve seen at other houses and on that trip to Europe a few years back with your Aunt Myrtle when she went looking for the ladies room in the Louvre after getting up close and personal with Mona Lisa, took a left when she should have taken a right, and wound up on a Bulgarian army rifle range being shot at by a squad of angry nearsighted kids who couldn’t get out of the draft and were glad to take their frustrations out on someone. American relations with Bulgaria have improved considerably since that trip and will go on improving, just as long as Aunt Myrtle stays home with her cats. But with so many different people interested in so many different things the perplexed host may find themselves in a bit of a quandary about what sort of conversation piece to get since very few conversation pieces appeal to everyone.

The host in this case should remember that the one thing that always excites interest is people, especially famous people. The famous are different than you or me, F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously didn’t say, to which Ernest Hemingway didn’t reply, yes, they have better press agents. But the chances of getting an actual, real life famous person to come to your party are usually pretty poor, all told, and even if they did come, you want everyone at your party to talk about what a wonderful party this is, not about whether some celebrity shows up and sucks all the oxygen out of the room. Let’s face it, celebrities come and they go; I mean, when was the last time you heard anything about Miss America 1938 or Ilona Massey or John Nance Garner or even Norma Shearer? The trick is to get someone whose name has stood the test of time but who won’t monopolize the conversation to the point where the party suffers. Not an easy thing to do, as I’m sure you would agree, but recently two books have come out that show the inexperienced host how to do such a thing and make your parties the envy of your entire neighborhood. Everyone who is anyone on this planet has heard of Albert Einstein and any party he attends becomes an immediate success since how everyone will want to know how you got the premier genius of the 20th century to come to your party while others will want to discuss the theory of relativity and how much they don’t understand it, having flunked high school physics after having spent most of the year checking out the cheerleader sitting four desks up from them, and still others will want to discuss Einstein’s role, and possible culpability, in the development of the atomic bomb, which is what your party would have been if Albert hadn’t shown up on time.

Now we all know, and if you didn’t I’m telling you now, that Albert Einstein died in 1955, so how can you get him to come to a social gathering some fifty years too late for him to bring a loaf of bread or some raspberry Danish or maybe a nice bottle of wine; this is something my mother always goes on about. Never go to a party with one arm as long as the other, she says, but that’s probably some sort of weird Irish cultural thing. In any case, Einstein may not be able to come because of his unfortunate death fifty years ago, but that does not stop his brain from being the life of any party it goes to. Yes, indeed, as the two books I mentioned above make very clear, Einstein’s brain is still available, floating in formaldehyde in some Tupperware containers somewhere in New Jersey. Of course, you can’t actually buy Einstein’s brain; the owner is not interested in selling, and who would be, given such a treasure, but you can rent the brain, I hear, for two hundred dollars a night, half price for bar mitzvahs, and isn’t a minimal investment of two hundred dollars a small price to pay for scoring the social success of the year?

And Einstein is not the only head in the ring, not at all; there are plenty of miscellaneous body parts floating around out there to liven up even the deadest party, body parts of every size and description, body parts for every occasion. Franz Josef Haydn’s head, for example, is back with the rest of the great composer, the head finally reuniting with the rest of the body in 1954 after a century and a half apart, but for the artistically inclined Francisco de Goya’s head is still wandering the highways and the byways at this time, and for the politically minded, I think Oliver Cromwell is still headless, said head being in the possession of a family that has (or had; the situation is unclear) old Ollie’s noggin in a velvet lined box, all set and ready to transform the dullest dinner party into a tremendous success.

For those who enjoy a bit of dirt with their conversation pieces, and you know who you are, the ambitious host has a choice between Napoleon Bonaparte and Grigorii Rasputin. Napoleon was the bigger man historically; a string of battlefield successes made his name as one of the great military leaders of history, and his revision of French law, codified as the Code Napoleon, remains the basis of French civil law to this day, marking him as one of the great statesmen of the nineteenth century as well. Rasputin, on the other hand, was an unkempt pseudomonk who conned his way into Tsar Nicholas II’s household with his ability to calm Nicholas’ hemophiliac son, the crown prince Alexis, and soothe the empress Alexandra’s hysteria about her son’s condition. Unlike Napoleon, Rasputin survives in history as something of a perpetual dirty joke, something on the order of the second Clinton administration or the riper years of the Stuart Restoration. So you can imagine how a dull party can perk right up when you produce, from its very own shoebox, the reason why Rasputin was so sought out by society women during the first decade of the twentieth century, an object described by one witness as something akin to a long, blackened, overripe banana. By contrast, and there is a big contrast here indeed, when Napoleon’s came up for auction at Sotheby’s in London a few years ago the catalog described it as tiny and looking remarkably like a shriveled seahorse. Given the relative historical importance of these two men, I think it is safe to say that this is one of those instances when size really does not matter.

To maximize the effect of your conversation piece on your guests, you could try to work it into every aspect of the evening, although I’d leave Einstein’s brains off the dinner table lest someone mistake them for the cauliflower. You must remember to treat the conversation piece with respect; in all likelihood you are just borrowing it for the evening and while you obviously can’t return it to the original owner, as your piece is a scaled down version of the original owner, you should return it to the current owner in as close to original condition as you can get it without actually administering CPR, which will not be helpful at this time. This is only good manners, after all, and if you show people that they can’t trust you to be responsible with their property they will stop loaning it to you, and then you’ll wind up showing your guests slides of your trip to the Grand Canyon, and they will leave your home convinced that you are a dullard, a bore, a dolt, and maybe even psychotic as well. I mean, who is that interested in the Grand Canyon, really? It’s a ditch, a big ditch, to be sure, and a marvel of nature, but when you boil it down to its essence, a ditch is a ditch.

*****

For those of you who are interested, the two books referred to in the post above are Carolyn Alexander's Possessing genius: the bizarre odyssey of Einstein's brain, and Driving Mr. Albert: a trip across America with Einstein's brain, by Michael Paterniti.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

I DON'T LIKE GREEN BEER AND HAM: St. Patrick’s Day is upon us, a common occurrence at this time of year, and once again all or us potential celebrants here in our happy little burg are shining our patent leather shoes to a high sheen, and I think I deserve some small credit for not inflicting the obvious pun upon the reader. We are shining our shoes so that they we may see them in the semi-lit conditions one finds in so many Irish and faux Irish drinking establishments and have something to aim for when in celebration of the great day we throw up the truly massive amounts of green beer we’ve been drinking. This is an ancient and honorable Irish tradition, or so I am told by those who know about such things, although it seems odd to me that a Christian saint would countenance the celebration of his feast day with a drunken bacchanal, especially during the penitential season of Lent, but then I’m not much of a theologian or a party animal.

Of course, St. Patrick’s Day was never as big in Ireland as it became in America; one assumes that’s due to the people in Ireland not needing someone to remind them that they are Irish, seeing as how they already live there, unlike the ethnic Irish who inhabit the dark places of the Earth like Boston or the Antipodes and need their memories jogged once a year about who they are and from whence they originally came. The Irish in America need reminding every so often, I think, seeing as how we’ve been so successful here. How do I know that the Irish have been successful? I know because the greeting card industry tells me so. When you go to buy a St. Patrick’s Day card you will, in all likelihood, see a series of bright green cards with ethnic slurs, slanders, and stereotypes printed upon them that would cause a more sensitive ethnic group to scream like a stuck pig. Since in this politically correct age, when all cultures are equal but some are more equal than others, the ability to egregiously insult an ethnic group and its culture means that the members of that culture have successfully merged into the American mainstream. No one complains, after all, when white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, poor Southern whites, and Midwestern Republicans are publicly mocked, so by any definition available it is clear the Irish are an American success story and we will kick the ass and then upchuck green beer all over anyone who says otherwise.

But what of the founder of the day, you ask, and even if you’re not, here we go. Most people don’t know much about St. Patrick, except that he drove all the snakes out of Ireland. This is not really true; the snakes left Ireland years before Patrick arrived, having received a better offer from the New York Yankees. Patrick actually drove all of the leeches out of Ireland and into my living room, where they sit eating me out of house and home until I get home from work to hit me up for some money. As you might imagine, St. Patrick is not on my list of most popular saints because of this.

Another myth about St. Patrick is that he enjoyed marching down the middle of broad avenues surrounded by hordes of political hacks, peculators, and other less felonious grafters while accompanied by massed phalanxes of bagpipers and high school marching band. This is a purely American tradition, unknown in other lands, and reflects the American love of industrial strength cacophony in all its myriad forms. St. Patrick disliked loud noises and walking down the middle of the street when it was just as easy to take the bus to work.

And while historians, theologians, and archaeologists may debate the finer points of the role of green beer in the conversion of the pagan Irish to Christianity, it is safe to say that St. Patrick himself loathed green beer. There is a passage in his surviving writings about a young man who offered him a green beer at Murphy’s Bar & Grill, whereupon the saint, incensed at this blasphemy when what he really wanted was a cup of tea and a buttered scone, smote the transgressor hip and thew with his bishop’s crozier, and then, in a spirit of Christian charity tempered with firmness, whacked him again for good measure. This may seem disproportionate to the untrained eye, but green beer is a loathsome brew, bringing discredit and dishonor to all shades of green and to beer everywhere, and those who peddle this shameful slop are the lowest of the low, and the authorities must deal with them forcefully.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

TOO MUCH CHEESE: We know way too much about people nowadays. It may seem strange to say this in our publicity drenched, celebrity obsessed culture, but once upon a time in this our Great Republic it was once possible for people to have a private life and no one thought them odd for wanting to keep their private lives private. When one robber baron of the Gilded Age found himself mired in a particularly nasty scandal, something having to do him committing adultery with another robber baron’s wife, he whined to J. P. Morgan, the robbingest robber baron of them all, if you don’t include Rockefeller, Gould, or Carnegie, and himself a man not averse to violating several of the Ten Commandments at the same time if possible, that he hadn’t done anything everyone else didn’t do, except that he was honest and above board about being a lying, scheming cad who cheated on his wife. “I didn’t do anything behind closed doors,” this dolt announced proudly, to which Morgan replied, “that’s why we have closed doors.”

Such an attitude could not and did not survive the twentieth century’s obsession with all aspects of celebrity. First newspapers and scandal sheets, then radio and television, and now the Internet, each successive media made the intrusion into the private lives of known and obscure people ever deeper and more profound. Today, in our 24/7 world of instantaneous new coverage, no one’s private life is safe anymore; everyone’s life, celebrity or not, is now grist for the media mill.

I bring this up because of a recent study, in the Sunday Times of London, which suggests that in any given herd of dairy cattle you will find a fair number of gay nymphomaniac bovines. Now, I am sure that the researchers are all honest and diligent workers in the vineyards of science and therefore I do not doubt their contention that America wets its collective breakfast cereal with a product created by four legged lesbians, but beyond the pure titillation value of such information, is there some reason why I should know this particular factoid? Is my life improved or my Honey Nut Cheerios taste better if I know this? And how do these people know this about dairy cattle, unless they have been spying on these cows when they are not at work? Will the next set of shocking revelations from these people reveal that most sheep are transvestites fond of Dior gowns or that the majority of pigs have unresolved Oedipus complexes?

Clearly, the intrusiveness of modern media is getting out of hand. I doubt that these cattle knew the press would make their sexual proclivities public in this way, and I believe the time has come for Congress to consider a further strengthening of laws protecting privacy. I believe the traditional don’t ask, don’t tell policy mandated by Wisconsin state law should be the national standard as well, and that the private lives of America’s dairy herds, as loyal and patriotic a group of vertebrates as you’ll ever care to meet, no matter what their particular orientation, should remain off limits to this sort of prurient tabloid sensationalism.

Friday, March 11, 2005

ANIMAL RIGHTS: My employer, the egregious mold pit that serves as our happy little burg’s public library, is in receipt of the National Anti-Vivisection Society’s Personal Care for People Who Care, a small paperback reference book with photographs of white rats, puppies, bunnies, and a directory of companies that use or do not use animals for product testing, the impression being that if you use almost any personal care or cleaning product available on the market today without checking with the National Anti-Vivisection Society first one or more of these cute little animals will go straight to Doctor Frankenstein’s laboratory to die a long, painful, and altogether gruesome death in order to find an inexpensive cure for navel lint. Each company in the directory comes with a small symbol informing the reader if that company tests or does not test its products on animals. One such symbol, an inverted dark blue triangle, means that the company tests its final product on animals. I bring this up, which is probably not the best way to say this, because one of the companies listed with a dark blue inverted triangle is Trojan Condoms. I would add some more commentary, perhaps even stretch this out a bit more and make an essay of it, but adding more is not really necessary here, is it, although I do wonder what these guys tell people they do for a living.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

SPECIAL RELATIVITY AND SUCH: I don’t remember learning how to read. I did learn, obviously; reading is not a natural act like eating or breathing or lying to your wife about where you were on Saturday night. No, it is a skill acquired somewhere on the long and tortuous path from the delivery room to filing your first income tax return, and I just don’t remember acquiring the skill. My mother says that I could read when I was two years old, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch, a bit of maternal hyperbole, if you will, something my mother is particularly good at. When my brothers and me were kids she’d wake us up for school by yelling that we had to hurry, it was almost nine o’clock, and so it was, if only in the sense that 6:30 AM is closer to nine o’clock than a quarter past ten in the evening is, but then you have to expect that sort of thing, I think; all mothers think their children are little Einsteins just waiting to burst upon the world stage with their brilliant insights, all mothers except, oddly enough, Frau Einstein herself, who thought her little Albert was a little slow on the uptake. It’s odd to think that anyone ever thought that Albert Einstein was not the brightest bulb in life’s chandelier, but it’s true. You never know what some people can do until they go ahead and do whatever it is you thought they couldn’t do and do it better than you thought anyone could ever do it, if you even thought for a second, which is not very likely, all in all, that anyone could do it in the first place.

“It” is, in this case, the theory of special relativity, which Einstein first proposed a century ago. With this theory Einstein, to all extents and purposes, upended the way people thought for centuries about the universe around them, a way that was just a gloss on how Sir Isaac Newton thought about the universe. Newton thought great and profound thoughts about the universe when he wasn’t being hit on the head with apples or inventing calculus in his spare time or having counterfeiters hanged, drawn, and quartered. Like Einstein, Newton had a government job, and in his official capacity of controller of the Mint Sir Isaac made sure that counterfeiters died in as gruesome a manner as humanly possible as a warning to other counterfeiters to get out of the business and to deter others from trying to counterfeit the King’s currency. The public executions also provided free entertainment for the local populace, all of whom could not get cable at the time, and a diversion for the adventure seeking tourist tired of seeing the sights listed in his Fodor’s guidebook.

These mass gatherings to watch previously undeterred malefactors dispatched gorily to their Maker attracted masses of currently undeterred miscreants, in this case, pickpockets, out to make a quick quid or two. The pickpockets’ arrest and conviction, led inexorably to their own subsequent public execution by hanging, this time without the drawing and quartering, an extra reserved for certain annoying criminals like counterfeiters, traitors, and telemarketers only. All executions, however, took place under the direction and none too watchful eye of Jack Ketch, by royal warrant, the official hangman of London, and a man acknowledged by all to have no real aptitude for the job. He did score well on the civil service test; he was trying to get into the National Health Service in a supervisory position, but the only such position available that matched his qualifications was in Liverpool and he did not want to leave London. So he had to wait for his name to come up for any positions in the capital, and until one did he took the hanging gig. He didn’t like the work; he drank heavily before hangings, a circumstance that explains why he botched them on a consistent basis. After a few years on the job he’d botched so many executions that the curious spectators came to look forward to seeing how Jack would mess up the day’s hangings, in much the same way that people stay and watch an incredibly awful movie so they can see if the movie can get any worse than it already is, and booed and hissed vigorously if the hanging went off without a hitch. Some London bookies took wagers on how many hangings in a given day would go wrong. The adventurous spectator could bet how many times Jack would have to pull on a hanged man’s legs in order to break his neck or how many minutes the prisoner would dangle before expiration, or, when all else failed, the number of times Jack would bludgeon the condemned over the head with an iron bar. Captain Thunderbolt, an altogether uncooperative highwayman, set the record in 1719, when he refused to go gently into that good night via the standard rope method and Jack whacked him over the head twenty-seven times to help him shuffle off this mortal coil, if you can say a man dangling in mid-air shuffles anywhere.

Einstein, of course, did not have to hit people over the head in the Swiss patent office; some civil service jobs are less demanding than others; although spending week after week going through patent applications for Bulgarian speaking perpetual motion machines and better fitting snowshoes for St. Bernard rescue dogs and new, improved methods of breeding smaller cuckoos for cuckoo clocks beating the crap out of somebody probably sounded like a good idea, if only as a way to relieve the stress. He didn’t do any such thing, of course; Einstein may have found dealing with wild-eyed inventors crazed by visions of lucre beyond the dreams of avarice inherently less annoying than Newton found dealing with people who made their own lucre. That’s always a possibility, you know; different people have different temperaments, after all.

Nor was special relativity Einstein’s only miracle. Eleven years after he proposed special relativity, he proposed general relativity, which is even more complicated than special relativity, except you can’t make bombs out of the general theory, unless I am confusing the two. Be that as it may, though, in 1921 Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics, and he didn’t get it for either special or general relativity. No, he got it for explaining the photoelectric effect. That’s right: the photoelectric effect; he got the biggest scientific prize in the world for explaining why the doors at Wal-Mart swing open without your having to touch them. There’s a profound lesson here for all of us…but I am not entirely certain what that lesson may be.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

MALPRACTICE: Egyptian authorities say one mystery about King Tut is now officially solved: the boy king was not murdered. It seems Tut broke his leg and the leg became infected, thereby hastening his death some three thousand years ago at the age of nineteen. A lawyer for the Tut family announced shortly thereafter a class action malpractice lawsuit against the Egyptian Medical Association on behalf of Pharoahs from the Scorpion King to Cleopatra, charging that members of the association provided the Egyptian rulers with inadequate care and that the association covered up a two thousand year trail of incompetence. The lawsuit, filed in Mississippi yesterday, seeks as yet unspecified damages.

Saturday, March 05, 2005

TODOR KUPOV, R.I.P., OR YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT: One of the great, unsung heroes of World War II died this past week. Todor Kupov died in his sleep at the age of 97 at this home in the little village of Krmumol, a few miles outside the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Surviving him is his wife of 76 years, Elena, and 12 children, 47 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren, two great-great grandchildren, and an octogenarian gerbil named Stalin. Mr. Kupov’s great contribution to the Allied war effort came in the years 1942-1945, when Mr. Kupov, a farmer and well-known author, was able to subtly maneuver Adolf Hitler into decisions that ultimately led to the Nazi dictator’s downfall.

Before the war, Mr. Kupov was one of Europe’s most outspoken vegetarian and homeopathic activists, publishing articles on the positive benefits of vegetarianism in the most of the leading Bulgarian newspapers and journals, articles which led to a popular, if temporary, vegetarian movement in the Black Sea and Balkans regions. German vegetarians translated many of Mr. Kupov’s articles and his ideas found a popular audience in the Third Reich, especially among the Nazi elite, who sought to curry favor with Hitler by adopting the Nazi leader’s vegetarianism. Among the more avid of Mr. Kupov’s disciples was Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, who gave the Fuhrer many of the natural homeopathic cures that Mr. Kupov championed. One of the more unusual of these cures became the focus of an intensive Allied intelligence effort that eventually forced Mr. Kupov, who enjoyed his celebrity status in wartime Germany, to pick and choose which side he was really on.

Mr. Kupov’s writings do not indicate when he discovered that the encapsulated feces of healthy Bulgarian peasants had some medicinal value, but Mr. Kupov advocated such capsules with such vigor that Dr. Morell began prescribing them for Hitler. The German leader suffered from chronic gastrointestinal complaints and Mr. Kupov believed that encapsulated Bulgarian ordure helped alleviate such problems. And for his greatest believer, Mr. Kupov made sure that Dr. Morell had access to the freshest and healthiest ordure available: his own.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of German military intelligence and a man who loathed Hitler and everything Hitler stood for, tipped the Allies to the importance of Mr. Kupov. In 1942, a highly trained team of Allied nutritionists slipped across the border from neutral Turkey into Bulgaria disguised as Turkish yogurt salesmen with the name of a secure contact provided them by the former head of the British Press Office in Sofia, Sir Steven Runciman, the great historian of the Crusades and Byzantium, hidden in the aglet of the team leader’s left shoe. The contact, a short, fat, bespectacled man with a wart on one side of his nose and a bad limp in his right leg, was a former student of Sir Steven’s at Cambridge University and led the team to Mr. Kupov, who was at the time visiting relatives in Sofia. The team leader then proposed one of the boldest plans in the history of nutritional warfare and asked Mr. Kupov for his help. Mr. Kupov, a man who always knew his own mind, agreed to this campaign of intestinal sabotage immediately.

The plan, devised months earlier by the senior medical staff of British intelligence, called for Mr. Kupov to subtly alter the content of Adolf Hitler’s fecal capsules by changing the content of Mr. Kupov’s diet, a plan which, if successful, would change Hitler’s mental state at crucial points in the war. While many military luminaries like Sir Arthur Harris called the plan stupid beyond belief and predicted that it would never work, the plan, codenamed DUNGBEETLE, succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. After some small experiments, Mr. Kupov found that he could best effect the Nazi leader’s mental state by changing the red pepper and lentil content of his (Kupov’s) meals. For reasons that are still a subject of scientific inquiry to this day, red pepper caused mistaken decisions on the Western Front, while lentils caused catastrophic decisions on the Eastern. In his greatest triumph, Mr. Kupov had a dinner of dried red peppers and rice in late May of 1944 and two weeks later, Adolf Hitler went to bed with an upset stomach and a sleeping pill and no one dared wake him up while the Western Allies successfully invaded Normandy.

Mr. Kupov did poorly after the war. The Soviet Union arrested him for collaborating with the Nazis and spying for the Allies and shipped him off to Siberia; only his great good luck prevented him from standing in front of the firing squad. After his release in 1956 during the Khrushchev thaw, Mr. Kupov returned to his now collectivized farm and lived there for the rest of his life, still advocating vegetarianism to anyone who would listen. In later life he received some belated recognition for his war work and his works are now available in English; many modern American vegetarians and vegans point to Mr. Kupov’s work as the major reason for their own conversion to the meatless cause. Mr. Kupov was philosophical about world history and his role in creating it. “I did nothing no ordinary Bulgarian does not do,” he said once, “nothing less and nothing more.”

Thursday, March 03, 2005

ENDANGERED SPECIES: The polar icecaps are melting, so I’m told, at a truly prodigious rate, which may not matter to you or me; I live at the top of a large hill and I think I can ride the melt out, and to be honest I wouldn’t mind having some beachfront property of my very own without actually having to buy it. But it matters to the polar bears and to those who spend their lives protecting polar bears, because the loss of the icecaps means that the bears now have some major league problems. Their endangerment is not official at this point; right now the people paid to worry about such stuff say that the condition of the polar bear is one of concern. This, I think, is a polite way of saying that the bears are on oxygen and waiting to get into the intensive care unit. It is only a matter of time before we get the bad news that all the polar bears are gone and that viewers of Animal Planet will have to watch grizzlies spray painted white by the producers hunt elephant seals in the Arctic.

I fear I can’t work up much sympathy for the polar bears. Most carnivores have what zoologists call a prey profile, which is just a fancy zoological way of saying a menu. Cheetahs, for example, love small gazelles, black footed ferrets won’t eat anything except prairie dogs, an honor the prairie dogs can probably live without, great white sharks like marine mammals, and loan sharks absolutely love compulsive gamblers. Human beings aren’t on too many of the animal kingdom’s prey profiles; we are too bony and there isn’t enough meat on most of us, with the exception of sumo wrestlers, and they can take care of themselves, for your average predator to waste the time, energy, and resources on catching us. Animals that go out of their way to eat humans are usually too old or in too bad a shape to hunt anything else, or else they mistake the person for an animal on their grocery list of comestibles, something that often happens to surfers, who remind sharks of seals. This is what happens when you are too proud to go get yourself a pair of glasses.

But with polar bears, humans are definitely on the menu. There isn’t enough to eat on your average ice floe for a polar bear to be picky about its dinner, and so if an old Eskimo wanders by on their way to the Happy Hunting Grounds the polar bear will go for the gusto and have some Inuit tartar; in the Arctic you never know where your next meal is coming from so you best take advantage of these opportunities when they present themselves. While this may make sense to the polar bear, it does mean it loses a certain something in the sympathy column. I am all for giving the natural world a break, but not when I am the main course. I know I wouldn’t eat a polar bear and I expect the same courtesy from them.

CAMELS: I am informed, by a young Estonian woman of my acquaintance whose veracity in such matters I trust implicitly, that the enterprising tourist can buy no fewer two hundred camels in Andorra for the sum of sixteen euros. As I am not in the habit of buying camels in Andorra, or anywhere else for that matter (I have no prejudices regarding camels that I am aware of, it's just that I have no real need for a camel in the first place and no where to house the beast in the second, and with the price of gasoline and heating oil being what they are at the moment, I feel that I am already supporting enough desert dwellers without actually having one come and live with me) I wondered aloud if sixteen euros for two hundred camels was too much to pay. This was apparently comical in the extreme, although somehow or other I missed the joke entirely, which happens to me alot nowadays—I think it has something to do with the translation; good translations from Estonian are hard to come by nowadays; afterwards someone a little more familiar with the language than I am told me that I’d said something about horseradishes and her mother’s bosom—and she informed me that not only was the price too low for the number of camels involved, but that the low price of Andorran camels causes the French government no end of political and economic consternation. One would not think that camel smuggling would pose a huge problem for French law enforcement; camels are larger than your average automobile and therefore a little hard to disguise as anything other than very large desert dwelling beasts of burden; but this is one of those cases where the commonsense conventional wisdom approach to the problem is neither common, conventional, wise, or sensible. Camel smuggling is a huge problem for the French, in that cheap Andorran camels undercut the market for more expensive French camels.

As mentioned, all this seems a bit counterintuitive to the disinterested observer and to most uninterested ones as well. The ordinary man in the Parisian street does not spend a lot of time thinking about French camels, Andorran camels, or camel breeding in general, not while he has to think about getting across the street before the light changes. If he thinks about animal breeding in the Pyrenees Mountains at all, and what are the chances of that happening in any given day, the first creature he will think of is a large breed of dog. The wide number of species that make this mountain range their home, including the golden eagle and several other exotic species of raptor whose names escape me at the moment, is apt to elude our man in the street, who is trying to elude the large Peugeot truck driven by a man on a very tight schedule coming down the street at twice the posted speed limit; thus does propinquity make provincials of us all.

Most people do not associate camels with mountains, which may be part of the problem. Camels and their relatives have a long and proud tradition of mountain living, a tradition usually eclipsed by the better known tradition of camel as desert dweller popularized by such films as Beau Geste, Lawrence of Arabia, and Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, which makes me wonder if that whole `who's on first' thing works in French. In any case, the lesser-known Bactrian camel, otherwise known as the two-hump camel,is a mountain dweller, Bactria being an ancient name forAfghanistan. This species of camel does not get the press its one humped cousin, the dromedary, gets, and it is probably pretty damned annoyed at that; Christmas dinner with the relatives must be pretty tense at that tent, what with these king sized egos going at it. The camel's cousins, the alpaca and the vicuna, are also proud mountain dwellers; the vicuna is best known for its habit of spitting at strangers and conspiracy theorists. The alpaca spits as well, but usually in when someone tries to fob off Bulgarian champagne for the real thing. Both creatures are otherwise quiet beasts that try not to attract much attention to themselves, a wise course given the unfortunate proclivity of some people of turning both species into clothing. The llama is yet another famous camel related mountain dweller. It spits like the camel and the vicuna, but lacks the camel's distinctive hump(s) and will immediately sit down and refuse to move if it feels overburdened. Once llamas carried all manner of burdens on its back without complaint, leading to its exploitation by North American shipping and trucking interests. This situation changed in the early 1950's when the llamas elected to join the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a proud moment in Latin American labor history.

This long history does not impress the French, who have camels of their own to sell and do not want to compete with lower priced Andorran camels if they can help it. French protests about Andorran camel dumping are largely nonsense, I think. For all the talk of an integrated European economy, it is clear from its actions that the French government regards certain sectors of its economy to be tooimportant to leave to the whims, vagaries, and occasional lapses of its European partners. Clearly camels, along with defense, steel, wine, and certain types of cheese, fall into this category. France's long involvement in the Middle East have given them a competitive advantage in that market and they don't want outsiders horning in on it. For years they have managed to keep other countries out of the Middle Eastern camel market; the botched 1974 camel deal with Qatar comes immediately to mind. Most people remember the sight of hundreds of Qatar bound Norwegian camels trying unsuccessfully to swim away from the sinking freighter in Trondheim harbor after a mysterious explosion tore a ten foot hole in the side of the ship. Even American attempts to sell camels in a traditionally French market have met with complete failure. The 1965 agreement between Libya, then ruled by the Senussi kings, and the United States fell through when an editorial in Le Monde pointed out that camels originally came to the United States in the 1850's, imported for the American army by the then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, who later became the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Despite the fact that over 95% of the imported camels remained loyal to the Union during that long and terrible conflict, Le Monde sabotaged the deal by stating that the camels supported the expansion of slavery into the territories won by the United States in the Mexican War, thereby implying that American bred camels were both rabid racists and imperialists of the worst sort. At the time, when European colonies all over Africawere gaining their independence, it was simply not possible for the Libyans to go ahead with the deal.

Given this history, one might think that the French would have no trouble suppressing the Andorran camel traffic. After all, one of Andorra's leaders is the president of France, and one would imagine that he could simply order the Andorrans to cease and desist breeding and exporting cheap camels. You might think this, but you would be the wrongest kind of wrong. Andorra's other leader is the Spanish bishop of a city that you've never heard of, and for the Spanish church Andorran camels represent a source of revenue they are not willing to surrender. The Andorrans began breeding camels with a desert and mountain warfare capability in the early 1920's at the request of the Spanish Army, who needed such multitasking beastsof burden for their campaigns in the Riff Mountains of Morocco. Since the Andorrans were officially neutral, they sold the animals to the Church, who baptized them and then in turn sold them to the Spanish government. The campaign ended, as all campaigns must, but the camels and the breeding farms remained, as does the involvementof the Spanish church in the camel trade. As the French Catholic vote is important to the current center right coalition that governs France, the government must step carefully in dealing with the Church lest they offend potential voters.

For their part, most Middle Eastern countries don't trouble to check for contraband camels; good camels at a cheap price are hard to come by, and they deal with the religious peculiarities of Andorran camels by converting them to Islam, an Ottoman tradition brought up to date. The Ottoman Turks staffed their army and civil service with Christian boys from the Balkans, whom they converted to Islam and who served the sultan in every capacity from simple foot soldier to grand vizier. Andorran camels receive much the same treatment, although there are now people saying that the forced conversion of camels is a violation of their civil rights and that Andorra should not sell camels to the Middle East for just that reason. Since the camel trade is so important to the Andorrans, the majority of the population regards these people as impractical idealists; others think they are French agents deliberately trying to destroy the Andorran economy. And so this sorry and destructive traffic continues.